


Walking and Looking

by sophisticated_apple



Category: Original Work
Genre: Light-Hearted, im just posting this because i have nothing else to do with it, nothing serious here really, so here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:40:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27114124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophisticated_apple/pseuds/sophisticated_apple
Summary: Kyle and Atlas walk together
Kudos: 1





	Walking and Looking

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this for school and the ending is a bit awkward but ill post it here because i don't really like having an empty account. enjoy!

Kyle was never really comfortable with driving.  
And he never really had to be. The small midwestern town nearby was close enough for him to walk there every day without much effort, and he thought the walking did him good. Today he brought a friend on his walk, a man (and I use that term loosely, what he really is can’t be described with gendered adjectives) by the name of Atlas. Or whatever nickname he picks out today. They were walking together because Atlas is a new visitor, not very familiar with the area where Kyle lives, so he thought following an “expert” as he put it would help him with that.  
“You go into town every day? Why,” Atlas asked in his hand picked out voice, like the fact that humans need things like food and water to survive. Mostly because it had.  
“Ah, uh, yeah,” Kyle sputtered out. “I- we need things to live, Atlas.”  
“Oh, yes,” he started, a bit of static slipping into his throat as he spoke.  
Atlas is a strange thing. The only single word that could describe him in the English language is god, but it’s more accurate to say he’s the sole creator, controller, and admirer of the universe. He treats the universe like a living art project and loves it to death, but recently he had the experience almost every creator goes through at some point. He hit a block. It’s an uncannily human way to get him to stop working on the universe and actually let him stop and admire it, smell the roses, take a break. So he did.  
“Where are we going now,” he asked. The static in his voice slowly slipped away to let the voice he chose whisper in a clear, soft tone. It suited him well, when he used it properly.  
“Mmm. I was gonna show you a… A…” He snapped his fingers, looking for the English word for it. “It’s-- It’s like a shop? But you buy old things that other people--”  
Atlas cut him off, “antique store?”  
“Yeah! Yeah, that,” he chuckled nervously. Atlas had been on earth for 2 weeks, but as soon as he got his hands on a pocket dictionary he was the most well spoken person Kyle personally knew. “I thought we could go to this-- this one. It’s small, and is like… a repurposed house from 1920.”  
Atlas, who had no real concept of how long of a time that was for humans, mainly because he didn’t know what year it was as they spoke, simply answered with a small “mhm.”  
“A-apparently, according to urban legend, it’s built on an old graveyard. The hill… The hill it's on top of looks very unnatural. It’s almost a perfect circle all around, and it’s rumored that the bodies of the dead people all gathered under the house to rot into the dirt it stands on now,” he rambled, clearly excited to talk about it.  
He took out his phone and quickly looked up the wikipedia page about it and handed it to Atlas, almost tripping as he started to walk just a bit too fast for his own feet.

The inside of the shop was more comfortable than the other two had expected. The store was, as the wikipedia page said, “on top of an unnaturally round hill,” but it definitely didn’t feel like a depression era gravesite. The sole soul inside the house was someone's sweet old grandmother, who had explained earlier that her grandkids couldn’t work today (the only employees in the store) because they were on a family vacation. Kyle knew the woman semi-well, and was somewhat surprised to see her working there.  
Atlas, on the other hand, was distracted by everything he hadn’t seen anywhere but this place. It was like a kid in a candy store, but replace “kid” with “god” and “candy” with “antique.” He stared at an old, stained, empty fish bowl for what seemed like an hour, taking in all the cracks in the glass and scratches on the bottom from being moved. He read the entire life this bowl lived just from the details invisible to the human eye, and stayed unnaturally still the entire way through. He moved on to the next mundane object, again staring at it like it’s a beautiful work of art, looking through every single flaw and finding all the story he can.  
One particular thing caught his eye, and any other ones he was looking with. It was a tall, almost new bookshelf at the back of the shop, right next to a door labeled “employees only.” His eyes, so sensitive to every little detail hidden in any nook and cranny visible to him, spotted the exact thing he wanted to see. It was a small, almost unnoticeable, well-loved copy of the Iliad. He went over to it immediately, more gliding on the air just above the floor than he was walking. He noticed just from the fingerprints on the cover that it was owned by multiple children at one point or another, and the sticker residue said it was owned by the local school, but he couldn’t care less. He had the odyssey, and he borrowed it because Kyle realised he had picked the name of a greek god and wanted him to know a bit about human myths, so he plowed through the book at an ungodly speed and had been craving more ever since.  
Atlas made the first noise he made since entering the store. It sounded like a satisfied sigh, but it was too staticy to tell if it was supposed to be that. He finally went to pick it up and almost flinched. There was something inside! He hadn’t looked close enough! And he was about to bore his way through the book right then and there to find out what it was but… something stopped him.  
Maybe he’ll save that for when they get back home. Maybe he can sit in his favorite corner and relax. Maybe he’ll read it.   
He went over to Kyle and couldn’t bring himself to bend and move the sound around him to form a coherent sentence, so he just towered over him for a bit and tugged at his sleeve.  
“Oh, a-are you ready to go?” he asked, putting back an expensive set of watercolors that seemed older than him, and Atlas simply nodded as a reply.  
Kyle told the lady goodbye and made polite conversation as he paid, and Atlas got to leave with a new favorite book and an accidentally stolen ring.

**Author's Note:**

> im not exactly a writer so. i hope it was at least fine! yay


End file.
